Competencies of a knowledge worker

I do not often post on the human side of knowledge management, I am an engineer and this makes me a process and systems person. I do realize the importance of people though, and during the weekend I found this entry on the Gurteen Website, based on the book Value-based Knowledge Management (Tissen, Andriessen, and Lekanne Deprez, 1997).

The personal competencies of knowledge workers are put in a model based on three ways of learning :

– cybernetic learning (information) : the ability to formulate a question, the ability to use searching tools and the ability to assess the value of the retrieved information

– social learning (interaction) : the ability to build up and maintain a network, the ability to share knowledge and skills in a team and the ability to hold a conversation that leads to new insights

– cognitive learning (intellect) : the ability to analyse information, the ability to reflect, combine and restructure knowledge and the ability to be creative in developing new concepts

This results in a 3I model, which can be represented in this beautifull picture.

Or simplified : find explicit knowledge, connect to the tacit knowledge and act on it.